We live our everyday lives, unconscious of the system of habits and buildings that are in the background. These buildings perform their utility, and therefore we do not need to focus on them, but on what we are used to do in these settings. Yet within architectural design, the focus lies often within the aesthetic instead of acknowledging the capacity of the every day life, the habit of dwelling.
Since so little attention is given to the customs of dwelling we can ask ourselves whether our habitat has become so obvious that architecture needs to take us out of our comfort zone, forcing us to inhabit extreme and complex spaces. Did we become so used to the simple rituals and action that form our everyday life that we aim for inhabitable houses? Or have we become so fatigued of physical space, that we spent more time inhabiting the virtual world and beyond?
To answer such critical and difficult questions we’ll begin leaving our own comfort zone behind, and move into a foreign language and to a city with its still unknown habits of dwelling. By crossing both borders we make us aware of the differences between usual patterns of everyday life and how they influence architecture and vice versa. Because habits are performed unconsciously, we often neglect their importance and are unaware of the changes that they may provoke.
Life and the built fabric work together and respond to each other, they shape a state of mind. Dwelling is therefore rooted in a particular culture and a particular place. Yet the interaction between both life and built fabric is often neglected due to a phenomenon that has been created in contemporary culture: the tourist gaze. This purely visual mode of acquiring information and conformation of what is beforehand expected, flattens our experience and knowledge production. We will move away from the strong focus on aesthetic analysis and we’ll focus on the underlying narratives that have shaped the built fabric. In this project we’ll look at building as a support for life, at dwellings as a legitimate parts of the culture of habitation.